IM Speaker Series - Fall 2012

Ahmed Mahmoud, Executive Director, General Motors, IT

Tuesday, October 23, 2012

Ahmed Mahmoud, Director of IT at General Motors, spoke to a group of over 200 undergraduates regarding General Motors struggle to innovate due to a large portion of its IT and processes being outsourced which causes a slowdown in bring new ideas to fruition. GM is now pushing to bring many of the IT jobs back in-house and hire UT students to take on a plethora of roles in their new Austin Innovation Center. Ahmed spoke to students about the importance of having some understanding of technology, coding, and information management. GM’s goal is to not only hire good people but retain them in order to prevent loss of knowledge capital, which is also a constraint on their ability to innovate.